Over the past two decades, researchers around
the globe have been busily mining human body parts and bodily fluids in
search of measurable substances that help to represent human life and
to intervene in it in new ways. Blood samples have been scanned in order
to find proteins that might help to detect Alzheimer’s Disease with
a simple blood test at an early stage of disease progression; genomes
of patients suffering from particularly aggressive types of prostate cancer
have been mined for SNPs that might be associated with an elevated risk
of dying from prostate cancer. And cancers have been genotyped to identify
targets for more personalized cancer therapies. This work on “biomarkers”
is not altogether new – some biomarkers have been used in health-care
practice for decades. However, in the context of the “(gen-)omic
revolution,” expectations and financial resources invested in this
type of research and in infrastructures that make this research possible
have grown substantially. This massive effort to re-order human diseases
and develop novel treatment strategies is still very much in the making.
At the planned international conference we nonetheless wish to explore
what this research for biomarkers implies for the daily practices of medical
research and health care, and what kinds of futures are generated through
the emerging biomarker practices.

We invite contributions from the perspectives
of social sciences and humanities that explore biomarkers in practice
and study the factors that contribute to the emergence of biomarkers as
critical forces in contemporary medical research and health care. Papers
should either explore translation processes of biomarker candidates, or/and
discuss the various effects that biomarkers create, such as in daily health
care practice, and explore the cultural impacts of the new developments
in the biomarker field in biomedicine and society. Presentations might
use examples that come from currently used or developed biomarkers; or
discuss historical cases of biomarkers development and utilization.

Abstracts of roughly 300 words should be sent
to doris.bichlwagner[at]univie.ac.at by
April 22, 2012.
Accepted presenters will be notified by April 30, 2012.

In this workshop, we want to empirically unpack
biomarkers from a historical and a social science perspective, tackling
such explorations of biomarkers as a strategy helping us to develop a
better understanding of the governance of life, today, and - perhaps -
start to think about possible bio-futures. We take both a) the current
revitalization of biomarker research and b) the plethora of biomarkers
that are already used in clinical practices as good reasons to explore
past, present and future health-care practices through unpacking biomarkers.

In particular, we wish to think through the
topic of biomarkers and their agency by unpacking concrete examples of
biomarkers, exploring empirically a) how these biomarkers are developed,
downstreamed and adapted in health-care practices; and b) what biomarkers,
in turn, 'do', that is what sort of effects they (help) trigger in their
trajectories towards downstream applications as well as in observable
health-care practices. Moreover, c) we also wish to develop a more contextual
understanding of biomarkers and their agency, seeking to use them as a
'window' through which we can develop a better understanding of the governance
of life, today, and start to think about possible or different futures.

Therefore, we invite

1) empirical paper contributions from the social
sciences and humanities that 'open up the black box' of biomarkers and
explore them in practice. That is, such contributions should 'unpack'
biomarkers and explore how concrete examples of biomarkers have been developed
in laboratories, shed light on the messy work of translating these candidates
into downstream applications, and/or explore what biomarkers, in turn,
have 'done' in these processes, or what they 'do' in bio-medical practices
and the social and cultural field. Such examples might relate to current
biomarkers; yet, they might also related to historical examples of biomarkers
that could help us understand how these have shaped the identity of modern
bio-medicine, and which kind of impact they had in the social and cultural
field.

2) we invite paper contributions that enroll
concrete examples of biomarkers to think through past, current or future
health-care practices, and their social and cultural implications.

• Our
Second Workshop took place from October 26 to October 28, 2010 in London.

•
Members of the Biomarker Project team have been involved
in the drafting of a COST Action proposal on “Bio-objects and
their boundaries: Governing matters at the intersection of science,
society and politics”. We are glad to inform you that this proposal
has been approved. This Action will give the Biomarker Project the opportunity
to be embedded into a large European network, thereby enhancing the
value of any research findings.

To learn more about this Action visit the COST-Website,
or return to this webpage in the future.
We will keep you posted.

•
The project was launched with a Kick-Off
Workshop that took place in Vienna
from January 8 to January 9, 2010.